The Ghost of Fun Times Past

Bonjour, mes amis! Welcome back to Chez
Marcel, where we dabble in fine Linux cuisine with a French touch
and, of course, provide our wonderful clients with healthy servings
of the proud and noble fruit of the grape vine.

Allow me to show you to your tables. Yes, I know that
François normally seats you, but he is currently indisposed.
What do I mean by that? Let me pour you a little wine and I shall
explain. I have a wonderful Châteauneuf-du-Pape that I
guarantee you will absolutely love. It is wonderful, is it
not?

François? Ah, well, at the moment he is in the wine
cellar. The air is cool and dry...something else, too: the faint
odor of magic. To his right, a corridor leads into the dark.
Turning to his left, François sees a wooden doorway with an
old, large padlock. Directly in front of him are several rows of
wine racks with several hundred fine vintages. A few steps behind
him are the stairs that led him down into the cellar. What do you
think he should do, mes amis? Should he walk into the dark
corridor, or see what is behind the locked door?

The classic UNIX/Linux adventure game is simply called
“adventure”, a search for fame, power and wealth as you enter
“Colossal cave”. Something must be deep beneath the stream that
runs next to the old farmhouse. You can tell, because all the water
from the stream pours into the ground through a two-inch slit in
the rockbed. Here's a quick reminder for those who might have
forgotten.

You are standing at the end of a road
before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small
stream flows out of the building and down a gully.go
stream

You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream
tumbling along a rocky bed.

Go on. Admit your guilty pleasure. There are times, mes amis,
when I long for the days of simple command-line entertainment: back
to the days when an entire word-processing package would fit on a
128K diskette. I won't bother you with the details of my 12-mile
walk to school through flurry of snow (uphill in both directions),
but I will take you on a tour down memory lane, courtesy of your
Linux system.

When I upgraded my system to Red Hat 6.1 (and even 6.2), I
was devastated that my old friend, the “bsd-games” package, was
no longer included on the CD (I understand some of the games had
licensing questions, but certainly not all). KDE and GNOME came
with a handful of great games, and the classic X games such as
“xbill” were there as well. Unfortunately, the command-line
classics were conspicuously absent. If any of the fine folks at Red
Hat (or Caldera, or Corel) are reading, I might humbly suggest that
they consider putting the text games back when they next produce a
release. There are some wonderful pastimes which take up very
little in space or system resources. People resources are another
matter. I should point out, however, that a text adventure game
looks a lot more like work than Doom, but don't quote me on
that.

One of the classics that is still around, and included with
most Linux distributions, is the venerable
fortune program (as in fortune
cookie). Displaying a fortune is as simple as typing in the path
name to the command itself, usually
/usr/games/fortune. Speaking for myself, I have
spent a great deal of time with this little diversion. A common
practice is to have the program execute each time you log in, thus
giving you a different fortune each time. This is done by adding
the command to your .bash_profile file. You can
even specify the type of fortune. Have a look at the fortunes
directory by doing an ls
/usr/share/games/fortunes. You'll notice names like
startrek, kids, zippy and linuxcookie (which sounds interesting).
Let's try to call up a linuxcookie-specific fortune.

$ /usr/games/fortune linuxcookie
I've run DOOM more in the last few days
than I have the last few months. I
just love debugging ;-)
(Linus Torvalds)

Interesting. You can also specify long or short fortunes by
adding the flags -l or -s.
For instance, to generate Star Trek one-liners, try
/usr/games/fortune -s startrek. Speaking of Star
Trek, the famous text-mode Star Trek game is part of this package.
Remember, though, you cannot fire phasers with your shields up. To
start, just type: /usr/games/trek.

Before I go further, I should clarify something. As I
mentioned, a number of the classics were now missing from my
system. Merci Dieu for the Internet, non? The bsd-games collection
is still available, even if it is not on my Red Hat disc. When you
get hungry, as I did, for the days of old (or new) when games were
lighter and healthier but no less filling, visit the Metalab Linux
archive at UNC Chapel-Hill (you'll find the link in the Resources
section at the end). This excellent group of individuals “never
sleeps” (or so they claim), making sure Linux users never run out
of things to do. In fact, if you haven't found what you are looking
for elsewhere, check it out.

Here's something for the Linux distributors out there who may
wish to take up my earlier suggestion. The team at Metalab has
taken the time to separate out the games that were at issue from a
licensing standpoint. From their site, I picked up the latest
bsd-games bundle, bsd-games-2.11.tar.gz.
Building the games is easy. Extract the files into a work
directory, then run the configure script:

tar -xzvf bsd-games-2.11.tar.gz
cd bsd-games-2.11
./configure

It is now question-and-answer time. The
configure script will ask you a number of
questions about where you want to store all these things. It does
give you the opportunity to exclude certain games from the build.
For instance, if you already have the fortune program installed,
you don't want to overwrite it. Next, type make,
followed by make install. I must admit I found
some of the builds a little buggy, but I could build individual
games by specifying the game name suffixed with an
_all. To finish and install the games, you do
the same thing, but with an _install suffix,
like this:

make monop_all make monop_install

Any guesses on what that game might be? Consider it an adventure in
program building. Speaking of which...I started this discussion by
alluding to Adventure, the D&D style of quest game where you
find yourself in a strange place with no instructions. This package
contains adventure, the Colossal
Cave challenge, as well as
battlestar, another adventure,
this time aboard a “battlestar”. If you really like creepy caves
and feel the thrill of the hunt calling, you might consider hunting
the Wumpus with wump. If you feel
particularly destructive, you might even learn a lesson from
wargames.

One game I highly recommend can be found in Metalab's
textrpg directory. It is called
simply dungeon. This game was
originally written at MIT and is the predecessor of the
now-legendary Zork games from
Infocom (a company whose brilliant
games stole a great deal of Chef Marcel's early years). The current
version of dungeon is dungeon-2.5.6.tar.gz and comes in a
pre-compiled ELF format. Simply extract the file into a directory
and run it.

tar -xzvf dungeon-2.5.6.tar.gz
cd dungeon-2.5.6
./dungeon

Figure 1. Are you ready to enter the
dungeon?

These games challenge your mind as well. How about some speed
arithmetic or a
quiz? I may be French, but every
once in a while, I feel the need to brush up on my Shakespeare.
quiz lets me do that, as well as
reminding me of Morse code, flowers and their meaning, and of
course, Middle-Earth capitals.
Type in the command /usr/games/quiz and you will
get a menu of choices.

This is just a sample of the selection. To start a quiz on
Shakespeare-lines, you could choose to identify the character based
on spoken line, or identify the work itself. Type
/usr/games/quiz Shakespeare-lines character and
you are on your way. Here's a sample for you to savor:

$ /usr/games/quiz Shakespeare-lines character
The quality of mercy is not strain'd?
Portia
Right!
My only love sprung from my only hate!?
Juliet
Right!
The better part of valour is discretion;?

Before the restaurant opened today, François and I were
chatting on this subject and decided that there is something, how
do you say, inherently geeky about deriving enjoyment from
text-only games and diversions. This brings us to Chris Gushue's
Geekcode generator. While this
isn't a game per se, it is a way to proclaim your geekness to
others who understand where you are and what space you occupy in
this busy, multimedia world. Here is a sample geekcode block. Whose
it is must remain a mystery.

Ah, with code like that, it can only be a sign that the day is
getting on and that Chez Marcel must soon close. In this world of
fast-paced multimedia games, it can be extremely satisfying to bury
yourself in a text-based adventure, and letting your mind work in
ways we don't do as often. After a few minutes (hours) of playing
in this old-fashioned way, you may even find that the images you
supply on the canvas of your imagination are far superior to those
of today's noisier offerings. I submit to you, mes amis, that as a
fine wine can improve with age, so can the experience of text over
graphics.

Speaking of wine, let me refill your glass one more time. I
fear I will be closing up the restaurant on my own tonight, since
François has not returned. I do hope my adventurous waiter
has not fallen into one of the open pits in the cellar. Do not
worry about him, mes amis. I assure you, he is quite resourceful.
Until next time, I invite you to explore and return safely to Chez
Marcel. Your table will be waiting.

Marcel Gagné
(mggagne@salmar.com) lives in Mississauga, Ontario. In real life,
he is president of Salmar Consulting Inc., a systems integration
and network consulting firm. He is also a pilot, writes science
fiction and fantasy and edits TransVersions, a science
fiction, fantasy and horror magazine. He loves Linux and all
flavors of UNIX and will even admit it in public. You can discover
many things from his web site at
http://www.salmar.com/.

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